Skin on My Skin (3 page)

I preferred when he played The Stones, but I’d take Hank. At least it wasn’t that jazz shit dad listened to in the containment.
 

I wondered what it might be like to actually hear someone else in the dark, though, someone right here in the room with me. Maybe listen to a heartbeat, the slow breathing of night rest. Maybe even snoring. I’d listened to dad do it for so many years in the containment bubbles that I almost missed it now. The penthouse was deathly quiet, like a funeral home, but I was used to it by now. You had to be or you were going to go bat shit crazy. I slid out of bed and winced at feet on cold floor. The entire apartment was cool and, standing naked, I shivered. I had heaters galore, but heaters would mean running the generators or using the batteries, which would make light and sound. Light and sound, at night, might bring someone to investigate the top floor of the Landry Building. Someone investigating the top floor would find me and my stash and that never ended well. Human contact was a thing of the past. People were to be avoided, at best, and at worst, destroyed before they destroyed you. People would hunt you out, if they got half a chance. It was the same reason I was going to the ceiling high windows with a black magic marker. Someone, out there, was going to make a mistake, and I’d be all over it when they did. It’s just a stash, bro. It’s nothing personal.
 

Besides the walled in community in Central Park known as Fortress, New York was dark. And I don’t mean dimly lit. I mean the sort of dark where you can’t see your hand in front of your face. The sort of dark where a pinprick of light in distance lights stands out like a burning sun. Fortress’ lighting reminded me of Christmas when I was a kid, back when dad would stand on the very top of the wavering ladder, just to get the lights in the right spot around the house. The people in Fortress liked to think they’d stopped the Preacher’s Plague, but anyone with any sense knew better. They had power, water, and solid containment systems that allowed them to pretend human contact wouldn’t make their guts explode, but it was a lie. Fortress, like the rest of us trying to eek by in the heart of the dead city, was just delaying the inevitable. We were all going to die and, one day, the rats and squirrels and dogs would inherit the whole rotting mess.

Still, Fortress had its perks, which were, namely, Club Flesh. A naked woman behind a hermitically sealed glass wall dancing for decade old cans of food was still a naked woman. I’d wander by there, later in the day, if I managed to find anything worth trading. Trading with Fortress was the one of the reasons that I was up before dawn every morning, scanning the horizon, looking for better stuff to steal.

Most pre-dawn mornings were a wash. Like me, other survivors weren’t going to advertise their locations with glaring neon signs. You didn’t survive fifteen years after the Preacher’s Plague by putting an x on the map. You hid, you hid well, and you took what you could get. If that meant taking from another scavenger, then so be it. We were the last generation of man. Rules were for the generations that went before us. We don’t have any. Most mornings the only lights I saw were Fortress or the occasional fire started by lightning or the hundreds of other ways fires started in a dying city. There were rare cases of someone getting careless, though, and that’s why you kept looking.
 

I was lucky, this morning.
 

The tiny pinprick of light was at least twenty blocks away and I gazed at it through binoculars just to make sure it wasn’t a trick of my early morning, waking eyes. The light held, though, as I stared, and it seemed right. It wasn’t a fire, not a candle. It was definitely artificial. It was in the top floor of a moderately sized apartment building. It could be that someone, like me, had chosen the highest spot they could for their hiding spot. Or it could be a new place they’d found to loot and were exploring it now. Fifteen years after the Preacher’s Plague began the easy spots had been picked clean. But there was still plenty of loot in the old city and the tiny spot of light was like an x on an old pirate map. I circled where the spot showed up on the window with the magic marker and drew a couple of reference lines. I watched the speck of light as the sun came up, trying to make sure I knew exactly where it was. I used a digital camera, after that, to take several pictures of my notes and drawings on the window so I’d have them with me later.

Scavenging stuff that had already been scavenged was way easier than trying to find it on your own. It was a way of life in the ruins.
 

Once I was pretty sure where the light source had come from, I started my normal morning routine. With the sun rising, it was finally okay to turn on the mass of electronics and electrical devices I’d hauled up into the penthouse since leaving my father’s containment house ten years before. The penthouse was packed with canned goods, bottled water, piles of electronics and stacks of DVD movies. I could probably stay up here for a year straight and not have to scavenge if I wanted to. I didn’t have to leave, but that was boring and reminded me of sitting in my father’s house, once the Preacher’s Plague jumped genders, watching him go insane behind the containment wall.
 

I first checked the power levels in my batteries, nodding happily that they were all at one hundred percent. I flipped the master breaker on and watched as the apartment came to life. I had an array of solar panels hidden along the roof that powered the bank of batteries in the guest bedroom. I can tell you from much personal experience that lugging enough batteries and solar panels to the hundredth floor of a derelict apartment complex is no easy task. I think I made a hundred trips over the course of a couple of months before I finally arranged enough juice to power the freight elevator. I have to wait until a storm is passing through the city to run that elevator, though. Wouldn’t want anyone to hear their way into my hiding spot.
 

I spent a week figuring out how high I could turn up the stereo and not hear it on any floor but mine. Then I’d rigged a physical stop on the knob so I couldn’t turn it any higher. Some old rock and roll, something my father used to like, blared as I headed out onto the balcony to check my plants. My high-rise garden is arranged to look haphazard, like the many out of control gardens that cover the city. Someone would have to look very closely from a building near me to see the ripe tomatoes, lettuce, and cucumbers growing in containers. Good dirt had been a bitch to find, dig up, and haul up the freight elevator over the course of several storms. I pulled a couple of tomatoes and cucumbers and proceed to make myself a chunky salad.
 

Canned food is not only boring, but getting harder to find after all these years. I’ve had my fair share of ravioli and chicken noodle soup. The fresh vegetables are a pain in the ass to raise this high, but worth it. The one thing I’m going to regret the most, when it runs out, is the sweet, sweet coffee. I have a pile of the little single serve flavored coffees that touch the ceiling, but they are, one day, going to run out. And I don’t think coffee beans are going to grow well in New York.
 

Maybe I should leave. Not that I’d go find the Preacher and his supposed cure. Fuck him. But yeah, I could go somewhere else. I think that all the time, but I’ve never lived anywhere else. Besides a trip to Disney Land when I was too small to remember well, I’ve never been out of the city. The thought of leaving terrifies me. I know this city and, really, it knows me. We were made for each other.
 

I flipped on the massive plasma television in the living room and cranked up the good old Apple TV. Plasma televisions are one thing I don’t think we’ll be running out of any time soon. They are everywhere and, if the weather hasn’t gotten to them through broken windows and busted down doors, they are usually in pretty good shape. The weather is getting to everything, though. It’s amazing what happens to a city when people quit taking care of it. Plasma televisions though… they’re pretty tough. Heavy, but tough.
 

I remember the big television we had in our house, the one I wanted to watch
Space Force Alpha
on the day my dad offed my mother. They quit producing shows then. There were no more rushes to save the universe from evil aliens, no more laser fights. I guess the show’s actors had better things to do. I have every episode that was made of it now, but I can’t watch them. Every time I see them fire a laser I see my father putting a bullet in my mother’s head as her skin bubbled from the Preacher’s Plague.
 

I know he had to do in order to save me. I know that as sure as I know the sun is going to rise in the east. She’d gone crazy, just like most everyone else at the time. Who could blame them? The Preacher released his plague on men, supposedly to keep the evil homosexuals from touching each other.
 
It made men allergic to each other to the point that, if they stayed near each other long enough, it would kill them. The evil bastard’s plan worked, for a while. Mankind adjusted and went on. Men no longer worked together, but men and women could coexist. But after the Preacher’s Plague jumped genders, rendering any human contact into a deadly explosive mess, anyone with any sense would have also gone crazy. The human race was done, finished. A pregnant woman would die from the internal contact with her child. A mother holding her frightened son’s arm would kill him. People were deathly allergic to other people. Everyone, back then, knew life was about to get very, very lonely. Mom had gone off the deep end, sure, but I don’t know that my dad had to kill her. I was also pretty sure that, those years later, he didn’t have to try to do the same to me.
 

I shrugged it off. I’ve spent years by myself never saying a word. You don’t survive this long after it all went to shit without figuring out the whole lonely issue. I can’t actually imagine touching a woman. Well, I can. Seriously. I spend quite a bit of time thinking about it. I think most young men did. But it’s just a dream. Because there is a cure for horny people and, after the apocalypse. There’s lots and lots of porn available. Lot’s is an understatement, in this sense. Sometimes I’m surprised at the sheer amount of it out there under beds, on old computers… in the back of closets. I can visualize what it’s like to touch someone, but I can’t really feel it. The last time a woman touched me, I just nearly died. Then she got a bullet through the head for the effort. Even if I could be with a woman, I probably wouldn’t be able to get my mother’s bloody face out of my mind.
 

Thanks dad. Fuck you, merry Christmas. All that.
 

Still, there’s that itch that’s always gnawing at the back of my mind. The human body isn’t wired to be alone forever, isn’t set up to spend eternity not touching another human being. Though I’ve never actually been with a woman, I know I need to be. There’s something in my core that screams for it. I’m sure it has something to do with continuing the human race, and what not, but I don’t feel it that way. I need to feel a woman’s touch and all I have is porn.
 

But I have a lot of porn. More than I’ll ever actually watch. But you don’t actually watch porn, do you? You just fast forward to the good spots. I’ll spend an hour looking for something that takes five seconds to get off too. Porn, sweet porn.
 

No porn for me today, though. There was a light. Something was happening over there. I’m going to go find out what it is. It’s not like I have anything better to do.
 

I finish breakfast and put on dad’s biohazard suit. The seals are worn and the armor chipped and faded, but the old suit still works well. I pack new filters and get ready for the drop, not that you could ever actually be ready for the drop.

The penthouse is served by two elevators. There is the freight elevator at the back of the building, which I’d left intact and only operated under the noisy cover of thunderstorms. It was currently parked at the third floor and loaded with dirt and canned food I meant to haul up the next time a storm rolled through town. The primary elevator was private and, before I crashed it into the ground level, very ornate. I didn’t use it and I didn’t want anyone prowling around the bottom stories of my building getting any ideas about using it either. I’d also gone through great lengths to sabotage the stairwells leading up into the building, doing my best to make it look natural. New York was, after all, falling apart. It wouldn’t be out of the ordinary to find ruined flights of stairs and blown out chunks of walls. So far it had been more than enough to deter interest in the upper floors of my building and I hoped to keep it that way.
 

I’d designed my own ride for the primary elevator shaft. It was really just a big electric motor fixed to wheels around the primary cable. There was a small platform I stood on with a set of handlebars from an old bicycle to hold onto. The motor was more than enough to winch me from the first floor to the top along with the weight of my suit and some supplies. If I found anything bigger it would have to go in the freight elevator and wait for the first good thunderstorm. The little platform would take the better part of half an hour to crawl to the top floor. The trip down was much quicker.
 

Abandoned vehicles in New York were even more common than plasma televisions. And typically each vehicle had at least four sets of brake pads. I’d been through a hundred so far.
 

My suit ready, supplies loaded, rifle slung, I stepped out onto the platform, and as always, felt a little silly swaying a hundred floors above a crashed elevator in a dark shaft. I took a deep breath and gripped my brake handle. I unlocked the platform and began easing down the line.
 

Any number of things could go wrong with my ad hoc contraption. The brake pads could fail. The locking mechanism could catch, catapulting me from the little platform where I’d plummet a hundred floors to my death. And who would know, if that happened, that I had died? Maybe in a thousand years, some alien archeologist prowling around the ruins of New York would find my skeleton inside the smashed bio-suit and wonder how I’d met my end. No doubt they’d think it was human sacrifice. It was always human sacrifice, right? I laughed at the thought. The ancient Aztec gods atop the Landry Building, sending hapless sacrifices to their death a hundred floors below… it would make for a great documentary.